This is a poem I wrote a few months ago while contemplating 9-11 and reading a large number of memoirs for my impending Holocaust Literature course. I imagined a person, the last person alive, who was there on 9-11-01 and so had the ability to "brag" about his witnessing the experience. This was a direct comment on how 9-11 was/is used to perpetuate certain people's politics and or egocentric needs, rather than see this as a global and human problem.
I used links to experiment with hyper-textual commentary on the event itself. Pictures, translations (I was interested in using a multi-lingual modality [English, Spanish, French, Hebrew] to suggest the cross-cultural nature of this problem), videos, etc. There isn't much room for the reader to "play along" with the text, but I do think the added layers of the digital coding and programming suggest more of a emotive response to the inflammatory subject matter.
Admittedly, the "digital" aspect of this project is not very dynamic. The programming forces a linear reading and links could easily be considered hokey and juvenile. I wanted to avoid multi-linearity for multi-linearity's sake and instead play with becoming more fluent in code language. As a lover of languages in general, I spent a lot of time playing with code in this piece, considering code itself to be a foreign language I was tasked with learning. If you were to look at the blueprint of the poem's design, you'd see my words along with the computer's words; this of course, blends with the other foreign languages. I didn't get very far in my code fluency with this project, but the discourse certainly helped me understand computer-speak, and how such a language translates to us on a screen.
This is a poem I wrote a few months ago while contemplating 9-11 and reading a large number of memoirs for my impending Holocaust Literature course. I imagined a person, the last person alive, who was there on 9-11-01 and so had the ability to "brag" about his witnessing the experience. This was a direct comment on how 9-11 was/is used to perpetuate certain people's politics and or egocentric needs, rather than see this as a global and human problem.
I used links to experiment with hyper-textual commentary on the event itself. Pictures, translations (I was interested in using a multi-lingual modality [English, Spanish, French, Hebrew] to suggest the cross-cultural nature of this problem), videos, etc. There isn't much room for the reader to "play along" with the text, but I do think the added layers of the digital coding and programming suggest more of a emotive response to the inflammatory subject matter.
Admittedly, the "digital" aspect of this project is not very dynamic. The programming forces a linear reading and links could easily be considered hokey and juvenile. I wanted to avoid multi-linearity for multi-linearity's sake and instead play with becoming more fluent in code language. As a lover of languages in general, I spent a lot of time playing with code in this piece, considering code itself to be a foreign language I was tasked with learning. If you were to look at the blueprint of the poem's design, you'd see my words along with the computer's words; this of course, blends with the other foreign languages. I didn't get very far in my code fluency with this project, but the discourse certainly helped me understand computer-speak, and how such a language translates to us on a screen.